Smashed #64: Review of the restaurant reviews
The UK restaurant scene digested
Giles Coren, The Times
Canal, London (7/10)
Did you know that Heston Blumenthal’s dad suggested ‘The Far Canal’ as a name for The Fat Duck? It would have been ideal, given that’s what most people say when they see their bill. ‘How much? Far canal’. Canal restaurant hasn’t got anything to do with Heston, but it is quite far away, depending on where you started, I suppose. Making his way along the towpath towards Westbourne Park, Coren had to walk past some working-class people, so he must have been very far from home.
I could never eat at Canal because I might have to sit at a long communal table and I’m the least communal person on the planet. Just thinking about the possibility is making me anxious. There is however an outside terrace, but it overlooks ‘stagnant bog water’ and ‘heavily graffitied red brick walls on the opposite bank’, which doesn’t sound too alluring.
There’s a crab doughnut on the menu. Crab doughnuts were quite a thing in 2014 when Nuno Mendes cooked them at The Chiltern Firehouse. Coren mentioned them in passing in his non-review at the time and olive magazine published the recipe. Is a decade long enough for their inclusion to be ironic or is it just a failure of imagination, or even worse, simply naff? Coren didn’t order, or even mention them, so I have no idea what to think.
He did order ‘The table cheeseburger’. I don’t know what that means. I think it may be that you order it for the table i.e. to share. Coren claims that ‘I often think, during a long vegetable and fish-driven meal, “I could murder a burger right about now.” So here one is.’ I have never had that thought. Burgers are set apart from other food. If you’re eating a burger, you’re not eating anything else, except for some fries. It doesn’t make any sense with anything else.
Some of what Coren ate sounded quite nice, but seemed like a random selection - here a raw Sicillian prawn, there a Mangalitza sausage, everywhere a roasted young pea with smoked ricotta and lemon - rather than a coherent meal. Wanting a ‘coherent meal’ makes me sound old. I think I need to stay far from Canal.
Best line: ‘The “beep, beep, beep” of drug dealers on stolen Lime bikes roaring past at speed is destabilising, as is the intermittent splash of old ladies being barged into the green, algae-crusted soup’
Worst line: ‘“We saw a dead dog floating here not long ago,” she said. “We had to call someone from the council to come and get it out. The children were desperate to stay and watch but he took too long, so we left before he arrived.”’
Did the review make me want to book a table: That barge has sailed (do you sail a barge? I’m not sure).
Jay Rayner, The Financial Times
Singburi, London
Hot on the heels of David Ellis (Smashed #63) Jay Rayner has headed to Shoreditch and London’s hottest Thai restaurant. You may recall that Ellis did not sing the praises of Singburi and awarded just three measly stars. However, Rayner is rather more positive about the place, although like Ellis, Rayner confesses that he never made it to the now legendary Leytonstone original. Someone who did go to the original Singburi on several occasions is Stephen Emms, author of the Leytonstoner newsletter. You can read his thoughts on the new place and how it compares to its first incarnation here.
If you want to know what the new Singburi looks like, I’ll again refer you to Smashed #63. As for the food, it’s all things ending in ‘y’. There’s a ‘buttery’ smoked chicken thigh with wild ginger; some northern Thai pork sausage that’s ‘thick crumbly’ and ‘herb-flecked’ and served with chopped lemongrass and a ‘crunchy’ radish, kohlrabi and peanut salad dressed with chilli jam. Larb includes chopped beef smeared in ‘funky’ shrimp paste and a chilli dressing. There’s other stuff that doesn’t end in ‘y’ too.
Rayner judges it to be ‘vivid, brilliant food’ but unoriginal, given its proximity to places like Smoking Goat and Som Saa (currently closed due to a fire) and in comparison to Speedboat Bar, Plaza Khao Gaeng and Kiln, where Rayner has also eaten a Thai pork sausage. It makes you wonder exactly how many Thai pork sausages Rayner has actually eaten and exactly where he consumed them. There’s probably a book deal in that - I Try Thai: show me the sausage by Jay Rayner.
Best line: ‘Singburi clears has the sort of back-story the writers of The Bear could feed off, and then ruin through churning histrionics and wanton star casting.’
Another best line: ‘Singburi has arrived as part of a movement rather than as something achingly new. Siri Kularbwong would be forgiven for finding this frustrating, given the others are generally run by Thai-food obsessed Europeans while he has actual Thai heritage.’
Did the review make me want to book a table: Yeah, maybe. I think I’ll wait and see.
Charlotte Ivers, The Sunday Times
Kerfield Arms, London
The Kerfield Arms in Camberwell was opened in April by Adam Symonds and chef Rob Tecwyn, who also run The Baring in Islington, which is currently number 17 on the Top 50 Gastropub list. Former Baring head chef Jay Styler is at the stove and is also a partner in the business. Now we know where we are, what does dear old Charlotte have to say about the place?
Ivers has got a bee in her bonnet about soup, and she’s not going to let the fact that some of the ‘soups’ she refers to are sauces get in her way, because that would spoil the, er, fun. I’m surprised she didn’t include the house spritz and txakoli she ordered in her definition of soup - well, they are liquid, aren’t they? To be fair to the pub, it’s not as though they were hiding the fact that there were soups on the menu. When you order courgettes and smoked almonds with ajo blanco and smoked tomato and ricotta with gazpacho, you really ought to know what you are getting.
‘Was it my fault? Did I order badly?,’ asks Ivers. Well, looking at the current menu online, there is chicken liver parfait, kumquat ketchup and grilled bread (not a soup), Cornish squid and lardo shish with pul biber chilli (not a soup), raw bream, green olive gremolata and sea beet (not a soup), Middle White pork loin, grilled apricots, spelt and hispi cabbage (not a soup). I could go on. Maybe the pub has quickly updated its menu in light of Iver’s soup ‘tantrum’ (her word, not mine) or maybe Ivers just wasn’t paying close enough attention to the menu wording when she ordered.
Although Ivers obviously felt that ‘soup’ was the hook for this review, she’s overworked the trope to the point that it prevents her from giving her readers an accurate idea of what the pub is actually like. You could say it’s a pea-souper of a review.
Worst line: ‘I woke, the morning after lunch at the Kerfield Arms, to find I had dreamt of soup. Soups red, soups orange, soups white and green. Soups in all their manifold forms.’ Shut up about the fucking soup will you! Jesus.
Another worst line: ‘the beignets didn’t need a sauce: the fish mush inside was so rich and creamy, a perfect contrast to the fried exterior’. Fish mush? I wish these clever critics would stop using fancy technical culinary terms. We’re not all Cordon Bleu chefs with Michelin points you know!
Did the review make me want to book a table: A soup-er idea.
William Sitwell, The Telegraph
Kokin, London (1 star)
Kokin. How is that pronounced, I wonder? Let’s not worry about that for the moment and concentrate on why on earth William Sitwell has given it one star. Kokin is, after all, the new Japanese wood-fired restaurant on the 7th floor of The Stratford Hotel in east London from the much-admired chef Daisuke Shimoyama of Hannah fame. In March this year, Andy Hayler awarded the now closed Hannah 16/20 and said ‘this is top of the range cooking, up there with kaiseki dinners in Kyoto’. What could possibly have gone wrong? According to Sitwell, it’s all gone up in smoke.
The omakase menu at Kokin (it’s probably Ko-kin, isn’t it? Shall we go with that?) included ‘oysters wrecked by a quicksand of cloying sweet jelly and a purée of “apple-smoked celeriac”’, and chawanmushi ‘that smelt like someone had tripped over and spilt a pot of stock on a bonfire’. The flavour of some barbecued wagyu was ‘more house-on-fire than cheffy grill’ and wood-fired ice cream ‘tasted like someone had stubbed out their fag in my Mr Whippy’.
I’m not one to doubt someone’s lived experience, even if they are the 225,156th member of Reform, but it would be very interesting to compare Sitwell’s drubbing to Andy Hayler’s take on Kokin, if and when he gets there. I’m not saying Sitwell doesn’t understand Japanese food, but I know for sure that Hayler does. I will keep an eye on Hayler’s blog and report back.
Best line: N/A
Worst line: ‘tuna . . . .stank like the bottom of a boat unsweetened by diesel, tasted as bad, and its hue was worse, reminding me of the loo on a boat I once took from Bombay to Goa.’ Disgusting. Unnecessary. Revolting. And that’s just the 225,156th member of Reform.
Did the review make me want to book a table: I’m not exactly on fire to make a booking.
David Ellis, Evening Standard
Lil’ Nashville (4 stars)
Americans take barbecue very seriously. Just read Vittles’ review of Lil’ Nashville and you’ll begin to understand. Although the author Gavin Cleaver was born in Watford, he spent years living in Dallas writing about Texas barbecue for the Dallas Observer. He knows. Not so much Ellis, who says, ‘It is not food to over-analyse’. Try telling Vittles that. The four stars seem to be more for the Chiswick venue’s line dancing and live entertainment than for the menu, which Ellis says is ‘shredded meat piled like kindling, waterlogged with barbecue sauce’ and ‘party food done well’. Vittles does not agree. I’ll leave you to read why.
Best line: ‘There is an advert for the bar bearing the legend “Tennessee, Montana, Texas, Chiswick”, which may just be the spiritual successor to Del Boy and Rodney’s “New York, Paris, Peckham.”’
Worst line: ‘spying a root beer float on the menu and opting to kick the night off with that. Ice cream to start? Even the server was surprised. “It’s got a taste you can imagine vomiting up later,” said Twiggy. “Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.”’
Did the review make me want to book a table: It sounds like fun. I don’t really do fun.
Tom Parker Bowles, Mail on Sunday
Lil’ Nashville, London (3 stars)
A second review for a line dancing club in Chiswick - what the fuck is going on? I didn’t even get a press release about this place. I’m feeling very left out. Unlike the dismissive Ellis, TPB is barbecue adjacent, having once taken Ardie Davies to Smokestak. If you need that sentence explained, you are not barbecue adjacent. According to AndrewZimmern.com, Ardie Davies is also known as Remus Powers PhB, founded the Diddy-Wa-Diddy National Barbecue Sauce Contest in his backyard patio in 1984 and is a certified barbecue judge. I told you Americans took barbecue seriously. Smokestak is chef David Carter’s renowned barbecue restaurant in Shoreditch by the way, just so you’re all up to speed.
TPB has also read Gavin Cleaver’s Vittles review, which is what prompted him to book into Lil’ Nashville in the first place, so we can expect some serious barbecue criticism from him. Parker Bowles has eaten hot chicken in Nashville and proclaims the ‘authentic’ chicken tenders at Lil’ Nashville to be ‘anything but’. He then starts throwing around serious terms like ‘bark’ to show just how all barbecued up he really is (it’s the crust on the meat. Just say crust TPB, we’re not impressed). Baby back ribs cooked in a Cookshack smoker (‘a vast and serious piece of kit’) are ‘pert’ with a ‘fine bark’. The bark on some brisket is ‘respectable’ but, unlike Sitwell this week, TPB can’t get enough smoke, which he says is absent from both the ribs and the brisket. Oh, the irony.
Best line: ‘Pulled pork is also a mighty cut above the usual cloyingly oversweet slop, with a decent amount of fat, a good tangy sauce, and proper homemade pickles’
Worst line: N/A
Did the review make me want to book a table: see above
Grace Dent, The Guardian
74 Duke, London
If I tell you that the menu at 74 Duke kicks off with a list of ‘Amuses’ that includes ‘Assiette de Cecina Wagyu’ (cured wagyu beef) for £28, then you pretty much know everything you need to about the place. Just to confirm, though, Dent tells us that this ‘mock-Parisian brasserie just off Oxford Street’ has ‘Mayfair’s mega-affluent tourist firmly in mind’. That’s not me. I suspect it’s not you, either. I suspect it’s not one single person who reads The Guardian. What is the point of this review? A chance to indulge in reverse snobbery? To thank God we’re not like the people who would book a table at 74 Duke? What a waste of everyone’s time.
Best line: ‘74 Duke is très French, but it is also a pricey, sterilised, movie-set version of France for diners with deep pockets and only the smallest yearning for true French cooking’
Worst line: N/A
Did the review make me want to book a table: I can’t say I’m super keen to eat a £38 bowl of rigatoni, even if it does have morel mushrooms in it.
thanks for 'Far Canal'. Pretty sure that used to be The Canal Brasserie. So now it's 'Canal', do we look forward to further name shortening in future; drop the 'C' maybe?
Lol re Singburi - I went to and wrote about the Leytonstone original many times, most recently when comparing it to the Shoreditch reboot. Should be a link or two on my page…